Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

For 20 years, I’ve been writing about clinical data management, analytics and what has now come to be known as Big Data. Like everyone else who follows this sector, I’ve been exposed to many examples of brilliant thinking about leveraging health data, and of late, a growing number of examples where data analytics has improved care and saved lives.

I’ve also reported on dozens of notable case studies in which combing EMRs for telltale signs of disease has resulted in finding dangerous or even life-threatening conditions, including heart disease, diabetes and to a more limited degree cancer. What’s even more remarkable is that we’re likely to see the list of conditions detectable by data analytics expand greatly, particularly if we make smart use of the growing flood of mobile health data.

The problem is, we’re still extremely far from achieving universal health data interoperability, and no amount of inspiring speeches by HIT thought leaders or Congressional bellyachers will achieve this goal on their own. We need a shift comparable to cultural transformation that fueled the astonishing progress of our space efforts. (Maybe someone should claim that the Russians are ahead of us in the interoperability race — we can’t let them Russkys achieve national health data interoperability before we do, durn it!)

And none of this will help me get the last few years of my life back.

You see, while the diagnosis hasn’t been all-out finalized, it appears that I have a case of early-onset Parkinson’s Disease. I won’t bore any clinicians with a detailed description of the illness, but suffice it to say that it’s neurological in origin, potentially disabling and at present, uncurable and unstoppable. I can probably still live a good life, particularly if I respond well to standard drugs, but all told, this thing is a major buzz kill.

I’ve had signs and symptoms that fit the diagnosis for at least a couple of years, and I dutifully reported them to the caregivers I saw. That included several encounters with doctors associated with the large, high-quality health system which serves the region where I live. The health system providers entered the symptoms into their jet-fueled Epic EMR, but it seems that despite that, they never put two and two together. (And as is still the norm, the data gathered at PCP visits has been in no way connected to the data living in the hospital Epic system.)

Fortunately, picking up on the earlier signs of Parkinson’s — if that is indeed my condition — wouldn’t have done anything to slow the progression of the illness. (If I had a malignant cancer, of course, this would be a different story.) But heaven knows I would have had the clarity I needed to make good self-care choices.

For example, I could have seen physical therapists to help with growing muscle weakness, occupational therapists to help me adjust my work style, joined patient groups to gather support and volunteered for clinical trials. (I live in the DC metro, not too far from NIH, so that may well have been an option.) And most importantly, as I see it, I wouldn’t have had to live with the vague but growing dread that something was Just Not Right for years.

Because I’m not a clinician, I’ll never know how likely it is that I could have been diagnosed earlier if all my caregivers had all of my health data. But I’m confident that interoperability and the accumulation of population data will help with earlier diagnosis and treatment of many unpleasant, disabling or even fatal conditions.

So when you go about the business of improving data analytics tools and interoperability, mining population health databases for trends and leveraging mHealth to improve chronic disease management, I invite you to think of me — not a tragic figure by any means, but someone who’s counting on you to keep connecting the dots. Never doubt that the human value of what you do is extraordinary, but never forget that real people are waiting in the wings for you to supply insights that can give them their life back.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Lately, there’s been a lot of debate over whether data from wearable health bands is useful to clinicians or only benefits the consumer user. On the one hand, there are those that say that a patient’s medical care could be improved if doctors had data on their activity levels, heart rate, respirations and other standard metrics. Others, meanwhile, suggest that unless it can be integrated into an EMR and made usable, such data is just a distraction from other more important health indicators.

What hasn’t come up in these debates, but might far more frequently in the future, is the idea that health band data can be used in personal injury cases to show the effects of an accident on a plaintiff. According to Forbes, a law firm in Calgary is working on what may be the first personal injury case to leverage smart band data, in this case activity data from a Fitbit.

The plaintiff, a young woman, was injured in an accident four years ago. While Fitbit hadn’t entered the market yet, her lawyers at McLeod Law believe they can establish the fact that she led an active lifestyle prior to her accident. They’ve now started processing data from her Fitbit to show that her activity levels have fallen under the baseline for someone of her age and profession.

It’s worth noting that rather than using Fitbit data directly, they’re processing it using analytics platform Vivametrica, which uses public research to compare people’s activity data with that of the general population. (Its core business is to analyze data from wearable sensor devices for the assessment of health and wellness.) The plaintiff will share her Fitbit data with Vivametrica for several months to present a rich picture of her activities.

Using even analyzed, processed data generated by a smart band is “unique,” according to her attorneys. “Till now we’ve always had to rely on clinical interpretation,” says Simon Muller of McLeod Law. “Now we’re looking at longer periods of time to the course of the day, and we have hard data.”

But even if the woman wins her case, there could be a downside to this trend. As Forbes notes, insurers will want wearable device data as much as plaintiffs will, and while they can’t force claimants to wear health bands, they can request a court order demanding the data from whoever holds the data. Dr. Rick Hu, co-founder and CEO of Vivametrica, tells Forbes that his company wouldn’t release such data, but doesn’t explain how he will be able to refuse to honor a court-ordered disclosure.

In fact, wearable devices could become a “black box” for the human body, according to Matthew Pearn, an associate lawyer with Canadian claims processing firm Foster & Company. In a piece for an insurance magazine, Pearn points out that it’s not clear, at least in his country, what privacy rights the wearers of health bands maintain over the data they generate once they file a personal injury suit.

Meanwhile, it’s still not clear how HIPAA protections apply to such data in the US. When FierceHealthIT recently spoke with Deven McGraw, a partner in the healthcare practice of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, she pointed out that HIPAA only regulates data “in the hands of, with the control of, or within the purview of a medical provider, a health plan or other covered entity under the law.” In other words, once the wearable data makes it into the doctor’s record, HIPAA protections are in force, but until then they are not.

All told, it’s pretty sobering to consider that millions of consumers are generating wearables data without knowing how vulnerable it is.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Here’s the news EMR proponents have been insisting would emerge someday, justifying their long-suffering faith in the value of such systems. A new study from Juniper Research has concluded that EMRs will save $78 billion cumulatively across the globe over the next five years, largely by connecting digital health technologies together.

While I’m tempted to get cynical about this — my poor heart has been broken by so many unsupportable or conflicting claims regarding EMR savings over the years — I think the study definitely bears examination. If digital health technologies like smart watches, fitness trackers, sensor-laden clothing, smart mobile health apps, remote monitoring and telemedicine share a common backbone that serves clinicians, the study’s conclusions look reasonable on first glance.

According to Juniper, the growth of ACOs is pushing providers to think on a population health level and that, in turn, is propelling them to adopt digital health tech. And it’s not just top healthcare leaders that are getting excited about digital health. Juniper found that over the last 18 months, healthcare workers have become significantly more engaged in digital healthcare.

But how will providers come to grips with the floods of data generated by these emerging technologies? Why, EMRs will do the job. “Advanced EHRs will provide the ‘glue’ to bring together the devices, stakeholders and medical records in the future connected healthcare environment,” according to Juniper report author Anthony Cox.

But it’s important to note that at present, EMRs aren’t likely to have the capacity sort out the growing flood of connected health data on their own. Instead, it appears that healthcare providers will have to rely on data intermediary platforms like Apple’s HealthKit, Samsung’s SAMI (Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions) and Microsoft Health. In reality, it’s platforms like these, not EMRs, that are truly serving as the glue for far-flung digital health data.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that on reflection, my cynical take on the study is somewhat justified. While they’ll play a very important role, I believe that it’s disingenuous to suggest that EMRs themselves will create huge healthcare savings.

Sure, EMRs are ultimately where the buck stops, and unless digital health data can be consumed by doctors at an EMR console, they’re unlikely to use it. But even though using EMRs as the backbone for digital health collection and population health management sounds peachy, the truth is that EMR vendors are nowhere near ready to offer robust support for these efforts.

Yes, I believe that the combination of EMRs and digital health data will prove to be very powerful over time. And I also believe that platforms like HealthKit will help us get there. I even believe that the huge savings projected by Juniper is possible. I just think getting there will be a lot more awkward than the study makes it sound.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

When you think of Epic, you hardly imagine a company which is running out of customers to exploit. But according to Frost & Sullivan’s connected health analyst, Shruthi Parakkal, Epic has reached the point where its target market is almost completely saturated.

Sure, Epic may have only (!) 15% to 20% market share in both hospital and ambulatory enterprise EMR sector, it can’t go much further operating as-is. After all, there’s only so many large hospital systems and academic medical centers out there that can afford its extremely pricey product.

That’s almost certainly why Epic has just announced that it was launching a cloud-based offering, after refusing to go there for quite some time. If it makes a cloud offering available, note analysts like Parakkal, Epic suddenly becomes an option for smaller hospitals with less than 200 beds. Also, offering cloud services may also net Epic a few large hospitals that want to create a hybrid cloud model with some of its application infrastructure on site and some in the cloud.

But unlike in its core market, where Epic has enjoyed incredible success, it’s not a lock that the EMR giant will lead the pack just for showing up. For one thing, it’s late to the party, with cloud competitors including Cerner, Allscripts, MEDITECH, CPSI, and many more already well established in the smaller hospital space. Moreover, these are well-funded competitors, not tiny startups it can brush away with a flyswatter.

Another issue is price. While Epic’s cloud offering may be far less expensive than its on-site option, my guess is that it will be more expensive than other comparable offerings. (Of course, one could get into an argument over what “comparable” really means, but that’s another story.)

And then there’s the problem of trust. I’d hate to have to depend completely on a powerful company that generally gets what it wants to have access to such a mission-critical application. Trust is always an issue when relying on a SaaS-based vendor, of course, but it’s a particularly significant issue here.

Why? Realistically, the smaller hospitals that are likely to consider an Epic cloud product are just dots on the map to a company Epic’s size. Such hospitals don’t have much practical leverage if things don’t go their way.

And while I’m not suggesting that Epic would deliberately target smaller hospitals for indifferent service, giant institutions are likely to be its bread and butter for quite some time. It’s inevitable that when push comes to shove, Epic will have to prioritize companies that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its on-site product. Any vendor would.

All that being said, smaller hospitals are likely to overlook some of these problems if they can get their hands on such a popular EMR. Also, as rockstar CIO John Halamka, MD of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center notes, Epic seems to be able to provide a product that gets clinicians to buy in. That alone will be worth the price of admission for many.

Certainly, vendors like MEDITECH and Cerner aren’t going to cede this market gracefully. But even as a Johnny-come-lately, I expect Epic’s cloud product do well in 2015.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

It’s little wonder. After a few years of uncertainty, it seems pretty clear that the wearables market is taking off like a rocket. In fact, 21% of US consumers own such a device, according to research by PricewaterhouseCoopers. That’s slightly higher that the number of consumers who bought tablets during the first two years after they launched, PwC reports. Not only Microsoft, but Apple and Samsung, as well as smaller players with a high profile — such as Fitbit — are poised to take the sector by storm.

Microsoft’s new entry is called Microsoft Health, a platform letting users store health and fitness data. The date in question is collected by a Microsoft Health app, available on Android, iOS and Windows Phone. The platform also gathers data generated from the Microsoft Band, a smart and designed to work with Microsoft’s new platform.

The idea behind pulling all of this data into a single platform is to integrate data from different devices and services in a smart way that allows consumers to generate insights into their health. The next step for Microsoft Health, execs say, is to connect all of that data in the platform to the tech giant’s HealthVault, a Web-based PHR, making it easier for people to share data with their healthcare providers.

Other tech giants are making their own wearables plays, of course. Google, for example, has released Google Fit, a fitness-based app designed to help users track physical activity. Google’s approach is Android smart phones, relying on sensors built into the smart phones to detect if the user is walking, running or biking. Users can also connect to devices and apps like Noom Coach and Withings.

Apple, for its part, has launched HealthKit, its competing platform for collecting data from various health and fitness apps. The data can then be accessed easily by Apple users through the company’s Health app (which comes installed on the iPhone 6.) HealthKit is designed to send data directly to hospital and doctor charts as well. It also plans to launch a smart watch early next year.

While there’s little doubt consumers are interested in the wearables themselves, it’s still not clear how enthusiastic they are about pulling all of their activity onto a single platform. Providers might be more excited about taming this gusher of data, which has proved pretty intimidating to doctors already overwhelmed with standard EMR information, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll find fitness information to be helpful.

All told, it looks like there will be a rollicking battle for the hearts and minds of wearables consumers, as well as the loyalty of providers. As for me, I think it will be a year or two, at minimum, before we get a real sense of what consumers and providers really want from these devices.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

In any event, the cost of integrating the IT systems of hospitals that merge can add up to 2% to the annual operating costs of the facilities during the integration period, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. That figure, which comes to $70,000 to $100,000 per bed over three to five years, is enough to reduce or even completely negate benefits of doing some deals. And it clearly forces merging hospitals to think through their respective IT strategies far more thoroughly than they might anticipated.

As if that stat isn’t bad enough, other experts feel that PwC is understating the case. According to Dwayne Gunter, president of Parallon Technology Solutions — who spoke to Hospitals & Health Networks magazine — IT integration costs can be much higher than those predicted by PwC’s estimate. “I think 2% being very generous,” Gunter told the magazine, “For example, if the purchased hospital’s IT infrastructure is in bad shape, the expense of replacing it will raise costs significantly.”

Of course, hospitals have always struggled to integrate systems when they merge, but as PwC research notes, there’s a lot more integrate these days, including not only core clinical and business operating systems but also EMRs, population health management tools and data analytics. (Given be extremely shaky state of cybersecurity in hospitals these days, merging partners had best feel out each others’ security systems very thoroughly as well, which obviously adds additional expenses.) And what if the merging hospitals use different enterprise EMR systems? Do you rip and replace, integrate and pray, or do some mix of the above?

On top of all that, working hospital systems have to make sure they have enough IT staffers available, or can contract with enough, to do a good job of the integration process. Given that in many hospitals, IT leaders barely have enough staff members to get the minimum done, the merger partners are likely costly consultants if they want to finish the process for the next millennium.

My best guess is that many mergers have failed to take this massive expense into account. The aftermath has got to be pretty ugly.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Generally speaking, cutting back on IT projects and spending is a tricky thing. In some cases spending can be postponed, but other times, slicing a budget can have serious consequences.

One area where cutting budgets can cause major problems is in preparing to roll out EMRs, especially cuts to training, which can lead to problems with rollouts, resentment, medical mistakes, system downtime due to mistakes and more. Also, skimping on training can lead to a domino effect which results in the exit of CEOs and other senior leaders, which has happened several times (that we know of) over the past couple of years.

That being said, sometimes budgetary constraints force CIOs to make cuts anyway, reports FierceHealthIT. Increasingly projects other than EMRs are falling in priority.

A recent survey of hospital technology leaders representing 650 hospitals nationwide published by HIMSS underscores this trend. Respondents told HIMSS said that despite increases in IT budgets, they still struggled to complete IT projects due to financial limitations. In fact, 25 percent said that financial survival was their top priority.

What that comes down to, it seems, is that promising initiatives fall by the roadside if they don’t contribute to EMR success. For example, providers are stepping back from HIE participation because they feel they can’t afford to be involved, according to a HIMSS Analytics survey published last fall.

Instead, hospitals are taking steps to enhance and build on their EMR investment. For example, as FierceHealthIT notes, Partners HealthCare recently chose to pull together all of its EMR efforts under a single vendor. In the past, Partners had used a combo of homegrown systems and vendor products, but IT leaders there felt that this arrangement was too expensive to continue, according to Becker’s Hospital Review.

This laser focus on EMRs may be necessary at present, as the EMR is arguably the most mission-critical software hospitals have in place at the moment. The question, as I see it, is whether this will cripple hospitals in the future. Eventually, I’d argue, mobile health will become a priority for hospitals and medical practices, as will some form of HIE participation, just to name the first two technologies that come to mind. In three to five years, if they don’t fund initiatives in these areas, hospitals may look up and find that they’re hopelessly behind .

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

So it’s little wonder that another group of health IT giants have stepped up to fight for such a juicy prize. A group lead by Computer Sciences Corp., whose partners include Allscripts and HP, has announced that it intends to compete for the contract.

The HMSM project is extremely ambitious. It’s intended to connect varied healthcare systems across the globe, located at Army hospitals, on Naval vessels, in battlefield clinics and more, into a single open, interoperable platform serving not only active-duty members, but also reservists and civilian contractors.

Before you burst out laughing at the idea that any EMR vendor could pull this off, it’s worth considering that perhaps their partners can. It’s hard to argue that CSC has a long track record in both government and private sector health IT work, and HP has 50 years with of experience in developing IT projects military health and VA projects.

That being said, one has to wonder whether Allscripts — which is boasting of bringing an open architecture to the project — can really put his money where its mouth is. (One could say the same of Epic, which frequently describes its platform as interoperable but has a reputation of being interoperable only from one Epic installation to the other.)

To be fair, both project groups have about as much integration firepower as anyone on earth. Maybe, if the winner manages to create an interoperable platform for the military, they’ll bring that to private industry and will see some real information sharing there.

That being said, I remain skeptical that the DoD is going to get what it’s paying for; as far as I know, there is no massively interoperable platform in existence that meets the specs this project has. That’s not an absolute dealbreaker, but it should raise some eyebrows.

Bottom line, the DoD seems determined to give it a try, regardless of the shaky state of interoperability in the industry overall. And its goals seem to be the right ones. After all, who wouldn’t want an open platform that lends itself to future change and development? Sadly, however, I think it’s more likely that will be shaking our heads over the collapse of the project some years from now.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Now, it’s worth noting that the study focused solely on the Veterans Health Administration’s EMR, which doubtless has quirks of its own. That being said, the analysis is worth a look.

To do the study, researchers used the Veterans Health Administration’s Informatics Patient Safety Office, which has tracked EMR safety issues since the VA’s EMR was implemented in 1999. Researchers chose 100 closed patient safety investigations related to the EMR that took place between August 2009 and May 2013, which covered 344 incidents.

Researchers analyzed not only safety problems related to EMR technology, but also human operational factors such as workflow demands, organizational guidelines and user behavior, according to a BMJ release.

After reviewing the data, researchers found that 74 events related to safety problems with EMR technology, including false alarms, computer glitches and system failures. They also discovered problems with “hidden dependencies,” situation which a change in one part of the EMR system inadvertently changed important aspects in another part of the system.

The data also suggested that 25 other events were related to the unsafe use of technology, including mistakes in interpreting screens or human input errors.

All told, 70% of the investigations had found at least two reasons for each problem.

Commonly found safety issues included data transmission between different parts of the EMR system, problems related to software upgrades and EMR information display issues (the most commonly identified problem), iHealthBeat noted.

After digging into this data, researchers recommended that healthcare organizations should build “a robust infrastructure to monitor and learn from” EMRs, because EMR-related safety concerns have complicated social and technical origins. They stressed that this infrastructure is valuable not only for providers with newly installed EMRs, but also for those with EMRs said that in place for a while, as both convey significant safety concerns.

They concede, however, that building such an infrastructure could prove quite difficult at this time, with organizations struggling with meaningful use compliance and the transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10.

However, the takeaway from this is that providers probably need to put safety monitoring — for both human and technical factors — closer to the top of their list of concerns. It stands to reason that both newly-installed and mature EMR implementations should face points of failure such as those described in the study, and they should not be ignored. (In the meantime, here’s one research effort going on which might be worth exploring.)

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association has documented what we all already know — that providers have idiosyncracies in how they use EMRs. The question that remains unanswered is whether this is a bad thing.

According to iHealthBeat, researchers dug into a massive amount of data which painted a picture of how 112 physicians and nurse practitioners working in federally qualified health care centers in New York City used their EMRs. To conduct the study, the researchers looked at 430,803 visits by 99,649 patients who came to the centers.

After analyzing the data, the study found that providers varied in several key habits when using their EMRs, including how often the updated patient problem lists, when they would respond to clinical decision support alerts, whether the appointment was with a new patient or an established one, and the use of the meaningful use objective metrics, iHealthBeat reported.

Why were providers vary so widely and how they conducted these tasks? Researchers said that there are several reasons for this variation, including the providers overall familiarity with the EMR system, the familiarity with the patient’s medical problems, and workflow differences due to staffing differences at the health centers.

According to the researchers, significant variance among providers’ EMR use suggests that it’s a good idea to measure individual level measures of usage, as such studies might improve research on quality and cost outcomes of EMR use. In other words, the study suggests that variance in EMR usage might lead to positive or negative outcomes, and that standardization — once best practices are determined — might improve outcomes.

The problem with this logic, though it sounds good on the surface, is that providers are struggling hard enough already to develop routines which make EMRs work for them. And as with any other technology, those workarounds are going to vary depending on who you’re talking about and what they’re trying to accomplish.

I’d argue that while tracking sources of variance in EMR use might have some value in improving outcomes, it’s no excuse to force standardization in professionals’ EMR habits, as long as their overall outcomes are appropriate. What’s more, a push to standardize how providers use EMRs puts the struggle to make them workable on providers, not the vendors whose product quirks are almost certainly responsible for this dilemma.

The bottom line, as I see it, is that while this research is useful, it should raise a red flag on vendors, whose usability levels are still far from where they should be. When you give providers a highly usable, well-thought-out interface to use which suits their daily routines, then it might be time to streamline their work habits. Until then, give them a break if you don’t want to spark a revolution.

P.S. If you’re curious about what the best thinking on EMR usability is out there, check out this list.